Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading make a return in select 2nd Generation Core Processors.

Turbo Boost is designed to increase productivity and better manage workload. As we know, there are still countless programs that are not multi-threaded and therefore can't take advantage of multiple processor cores. With Turbo Boost, when your system is running an application that isn't multi-threaded, the secondary core(s) of the processor effectively shut down and the primary working core(s) operating frequency is ramped up.

Turbo Boost for desktop processors is disabled on Core i3 CPUs but is available on i5 and i7 models at varying speeds. Max Turbo Frequency is up to 400 MHz over the CPU Base Frequency on all chips except the i5-2400 which is limited to 300 MHz.

Additionally, the integrated graphics frequency can also scale in relation to the CPU frequency. Graphics render frequency is selected by the processor dynamically based on graphics workload demand. The processor can optimize both processor and Processor Graphics performance by managing power for the overall package. For the Processor Graphics, this allows an increase in the render core frequency and increased graphics performance for graphics intensive workloads.

Hyper-Threading also returns on select 2nd Gen Core Processors. Intel HT Technology allows one physical processor core to present two logical cores to the operating system, which allows it to support two threads at once. Hyper-Threading is enabled on Core i3 chips (two cores, four threads) and i7 models (four cores, eight threads). Core i5 models feature four cores and four threads.

A new addition to this year's Core processors is support for Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instructions. AVX improves floating point & vector computation in mainstream scientific and engineering numerical applications, visual processing, recognition, data-mining/synthesis, gaming, physics, cryptography and other areas of applications.